


the worst things come from inside here

by pharaohleap



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pokemon Colosseum & XD
Genre: Gen, I don't like sand, and it gets everywhere, it's course and rough and irritating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 08:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14996771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pharaohleap/pseuds/pharaohleap
Summary: You think of Gateon and its shining pearl harbor, of the boats that dock there, and of the regions beyond: brighter and greener than the sea of white sand that stretches out before you.





	the worst things come from inside here

Your motorcycle breaks down somewhere between Phenac and Pyrite, and had you not the firsthand experience of this very thing happening time and time again when you were younger and the vehicle younger, still, you'd be as good as a dead man beneath the blazing heat of the Orrean Sun.  
  
It's been some time since you've had to do this, so long that you can't even recall the last time. Trial and error was what had the hovering bike in such pristine shape ( _or, you should say, as pristine as something caked in dirt and built entirely from scrap metal can be_ ), error being situations just like this with less experience and impulse control under your belt and a farther distance still to the nearest sign of any kind of civilization, abandoned _or_ infested with thugs. No one had helped you then, whether you had to push the malfunctioning machine through sand and borderline heat exhaustion or not. By now, you don't even think to ask for it; aren't even certain that you'd accept any aid that would be, impossibly, offered to you, anyway. If you couldn't even handle getting stranded in the desert – a desert, mind, that spans the entirety of the only region you've ever known – then you shouldn't have been able to make it out alive of the things that you have: your days in Snagem, your betrayal of them, the threat of Cipher. The memories flood through you, and suddenly this all feels like child's play, ignoring, even, the way your body moves through the motions by muscle memory alone.  
  
Orpheus jumps down from the passenger's side almost as soon as you've taken your first step off the offending vehicle, claiming his spot in the shade cast by it in expectancy for a long wait. His brother, on the other hand, seems all too fine with continuing to sunbathe where he remains, assuming Thanatos bothered to wake up at the sudden sputtering and jerking of his over-sized metal-made bed at all. You hope a long wait isn't what you're going to be giving them, though. If it isn't just the heat getting to your head, the rock formation to the west looks all too familiar, an atmospheric tick on the clock that says you're still an hour or so away from your destination. An hour extra wouldn't hurt in any other landscape, but being born buried in sand doesn't make you loathe it any less, and you're antsier than the rest to finish your journey. _You_ , after all, can't recede into the air conditioned luxury of a PokeBall. At least – not to your knowledge. Assuming memory serves, you can vaguely recall the last fix ( _or one of, at least_ ) boiling down to little more than hitting your wrench against the engine until it sputtered to life again. A sigh tears itself from your lips when your fortune doesn't seem to be nearly so fine this time around.  
  
Long wait it is.  
  
The silence of the vast desert around you would be suffocating for anyone who was not so used to it. You've always been a man of few words, perhaps credit to the sound of nothing but wind in your ear or the distant cawing of a Skarmory soaring too far overhead to catch. Rather than stifling, you take it as a moment to reflect. _Anything_ , really, to keep your mind occupied as your hands run themselves through the motion of maintenance after so long without having a need to. There's... a lot to reflect _on_ , you realize tiredly. You can't remember a year in your life quite as hectic as the one that has recently drawn to a close, and that takes into consideration your former lifestyle of thieving from any and all, outrunning the law, and trying to keep yourself alive in a band of thugs barely qualifying as a criminal syndicate. You've been caught up in so much of it until now – even with the active threat gone, it was drive here, aid there, false alarm on another Shadow Pokemon let loose even further still – that you'd never even gotten the chance to sit back and think of it all before. Even now, Rui's chatter would typically be filling the air. While you don't miss the knives that had pressed to your skin and the especially violent encounters with the Pokemon you'd tasked yourself with rehabilitating, _that_ is definitely something you find yourself aching for now.  
  
Your initial meeting with her had been entirely chance. Honesty would dictate that a great _many_ of the things that have happened to you in recent memory were entirely in the hands of luck, the sort that was gracious enough to land in your favor more often than it didn't, but none of them were quite like the first. An encounter with her kidnappers at the first location you stopped at after blowing the Snagem base sky high in Eclo? Unlikely. Rescuing her in the nick of time in the very city she'd been headed to? Scripted, practically. You hadn't meant to stick around long after battling her captors into submission ( _if you're being truthful, you hadn't even intended to battle them at all; someone else's problem, right up until the citizens of Phenac all turned their expectant eyes on you and suddenly made it_ yours), but you were quick to learn how difficult it was to say “no” to any request she made of you. How easily you brushed it off at first, too: “I've got nothing better to do” _or_ “Playing body guard might help hide my identity” _or_ “This girl definitely knows something, and I want in”. Excuses, really. She pulled you around on a leash from the get go. And you? You were surprised to find that you didn't really mind.  
  
Pokemon with artificially closed hearts. That's always how they'd put it, like hearts were a thing that could be “closed” to begin with. Maybe they all skirted around the real reason; you had your guesses that the results stemmed just as much from how the experimentation was carried out as the experimentation itself. Distortion World, maybe there was no “experimentation” at all: just poor, innocent Pokemon, beaten and broken until everything they laid eyes on became a target. A funny little theory you could play with had you been the sort to toy with such things at all; never mind the gaping holes in it.  
  
It wasn't Rui's smile, irresistible from the first time you laid eyes on it that made you agree to her outrageous plan to systematically steal broken Pokemon from trainers undeserving of them. Even then, when it had seemed like there would only be a handful scattered throughout the Orrean sands and the arduous task would be done within a matter of days rather than _weeks_ , that alone wouldn't have been enough to persuade you. You wore, _wear_ the Snag Machine on your arm because it is safest there, fastened to your body, impossible to steal. Back then, you'd sworn to never use it again. ( _But_ that _was why you agreed. Atonement. Redemption. Dramatic words for such a simple concept. You_ recognized _some of those Pokemon, bleeding black that only your partner could see, eyes wild and fangs bared in a way that no Pokemon's should ever be. You recognized them because you'd stolen them once before. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. It was, not entirely, but definitely in part_ your fault _that things had ended up this way, played like a pawn before you'd ever even heard the name “Cipher”. By that logic, you had to play a part in undoing it to make amends._ )  
  
Was that it, though?  
  
( _No._  
  
( _You'd been certain, in that moment when Wakin told her a secret you hadn't even really had the chance to keep, that she would abandon you. It would have only been a minor loss. Your opinion of her was indifferent by every definition of the word. At worst, she'd flee and tell the whole city of your presence and your “position” – or lack thereof, if accuracy mattered at all – although you couldn't imagine it'd be that much of a challenge to get her to shut up before it became a problem. But the shock that had colored her face had only been temporary, melting away into what you'd come to learn was her default expression, and she'd only go on to cheer you on as you put your cocky ex-co-worker in his place outside the colosseum's doors._  
  
( _Maybe it's here that you first think that you could do better. It could be blind optimism tinting her gaze rose – but even then, you've only met the cynical and the snide, with yourself right there among them. You could do, perhaps with a dose of a new drug for a change._ )  
  
“Fuck,” you curse when your hand gets caught between metal, arm yanking itself in a sudden flighty reaction. Ho-oh, you really _are_ out of practice with this, aren't you?  
  
Not that you would have had time to worry about bike maintenance once your goal in life switched very quickly from “lose yourself in the crowds” to “rescue corrupted Pokemon from villainous trainers”. Distortion World, you spent more time trying to coerce your Orpheus and Thanatos into relinquishing their claim on the passenger side of your motorcycle – because again, PokeBalls were a luxury exclusive to _them_ , not you and your newly acquired red-haired companion. From Phenac, it was off to Pyrite ( _your birthplace, but not your 'home'_ ), and from Pyrite, Agate, and from Agate, Mt. Battle – onward and onward and onward until Realgem Tower was dusting the sky and the humble little mayor who had sworn to help you on that very first day was revealing himself to the region entire that _he_ was the madman behind it all.  
  
It had been hard fought the whole way up that blasted building. The fact that he almost made his grand escape, intervened only by divine retribution from the rainbow bird almost made you more mad than the Shadow Pokemon themselves. _Had_ he, you imagine, you could have looked forward to even _more_ Pokemon that needed rehabilitation, never mind the fifty some you'd took it upon yourself to raise near single-handedly. Miror B., Dakim, Venus, Ein, Nascour, Evice – each and every one of them down for the count, but only the last two behind bars to show for it. You had _figured_ , going in, that the end would come with the downfall of their leader. Reports of remaining Shadow Pokemon – why, even a doppelganger of yourself going around committing crime in your name – kept flooding in, though, long after Realgem closed its doors to the public for what you hoped was for good. The numbers have thinned by now, fortunately, enough that wariness wasn't quick on your heels when you dropped your partner-in-crime off at Agate to recuperate with her family. Idly, however, you can't help but wonder if they'll ever _really_ stop.  
  
“ _You're a hero_ ,” they'd said, eyes full of hope that you'd long believed to have left Orre entirely. Everywhere you went, it felt, people stopped you in your path to praise, to attack, to challenge, because it's not every day in one's life that they get to speak face-to-face with the _Hero of Orre_.  
  
What a load of Tauros shit. Right place, right time, right machine. All up to chance. You don't need their praise. You don't _want_ it.  
  
“I'm getting real sick of this desert.”  
  
You wipe sweat from your brow as you stand, gaze locked with the Umbreon that's turned his head to look up at you from the shade. Eyes as old as yours, ones you've known for longer than you remember. Sometimes, you think you hate this region you've been heralded the hero of – but you don't hate your partners. You don't think you ever could. “One of these days, we're going to hitch a ride on one of those boats at Gateon and get out of this hellhole. What do you say, Or?” He tilts his head at you – then rests it back down on his front paws, eyes closed, ears shut out to the rest of the world. This is the most you've talked all day, you realize, and _that_ , you know, you can blame on the heat.  
  
Your motorcycle can't be repaired with what meager tools you have in your toolbox, it turns out. The trip by foot to Pyrite, then, becomes a group effort of muscles and psychics, each heaving the useless hunk of metal across burning desert sand. ( _All the while, you think of Gateon and its shining pearl harbor, of the boats that dock there, and of the regions beyond: brighter and greener than the sea of white that stretches out before you –_  
  
infinitely.)

**Author's Note:**

> It literally took until me giving this fic a last once-over to check for typos that I realized that Realgem Tower = "real gem", and I think I want to die.
> 
> I apparently only write stupid character applications anymore, as is evidenced by 50% of my uploaded works being character apps and the other 50% being Mindcrime one-shots, oops. When I wrote this, I was trying to kinda experiment with different styles (since, including non-canon characters, I had about fifteen apps that needed writing in a very short span of time and was getting sick of the standard pretentious-sounding fair), this one being Wes sorta... musing about the major events of - well, not his life, but at least Colosseum - within the scope of a really mundane event out in the desert, instead of just a cut and dry retelling of the events themselves live time. It may not be my strongest work, but it's simple in a way a lot of my works aren't, and I think I like it all the more for that.
> 
> Title comes from the song Einstein on the Beach by Counting Crows.


End file.
